Audience demographics and consumption habits are frequently used by broadcast content providers and media stations in industries such as terrestrial and satellite radio, cable, Internet, cellular telephone and other wireless communications, newspapers, billboards, and the like. Media stations are often rated or ranked based on audience membership, listener-ship, viewer-ship, webpage hits, and the like. A greater number of audience members generally results in a higher rating, and potentially greater advertising revenue. This type of information is available from a variety of conventional sources. Arbitron, for example, collects audience exposure data and provides it in various formats, including “Portable People Meter” (PPM) data.
Information about which media programs are broadcast on particular stations at particular times is also used by content providers for various purposes. For example, data related to broadcast content can help evaluate a station's compliance with advertising programs and broadcast schedules. Data identifying stations on which a particular media program was broadcast, and corresponding broadcast times, is available from sources such as Media Monitors, which collects audio from various media stations using field sites in major markets.
Various statistical techniques are commonly used to evaluate available data. However, currently employed evaluation techniques do not take into account all of the possible ways data from various different sources can be usefully combined, evaluated, and presented.